Question

If I’ve got the following, really for any string where you check IsNullOrEmpty and it turns up empty, what kind of exception type should one throw, and it’s not a argument to a method?

I always have a hard time picking exception types because there are so damn many of them. And this is just grabbing a value from the web.config and checking if SandboxSoapApiUsername returned empty.

if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(ConfigUtility.SandboxSoapApiUsername))
        throw new WTF do I throw here??? ahhh

It probably depends on the use/context right? Well I will use the string returned to set a class private field. So I need to check if it’s empty string early in the process rather than later (rather than rely on other code to check the property related to the private field I will set ConfigUtility.SandboxSoapApiUsername to).

Since the properties in this class that I’m setting each ConfigUtility.MEthodName to is going to be used in a SOAP request I thought maybe UriFormatException would be appropriate here even though this is not the Uri?

Answer 1

It depends when the string comes from. An argument might cause an ArgumentNullException. Configuration might throw a ConfigurationException (which seems to be applicable to this case). Or you can of course create your own anyway.